The starting line
Get yourself off to a great start as a writer, with advice from Patsy Collins
The absolute basics
To get started as a writer you really only need two things. The first is a way to record your words. Paper is the traditional medium to receive our prose or poetry and a pen is ideal for getting the words onto it. Fortunately both of these are widely available and not too expensive.
The other thing you need is enough interest to give it a go. You have that. Okay, that’s really just an assumption on my part, but I’m right, aren’t I? Excellent; you’re all set to start! Get the draft of the short story or opening chapter of your novel down and proudly tell people you’re a writer.
‘But it can’t be that simple, can it?’ I hear you ask. (I’m a writer so it’s okay for me to hear voices, even the imagined voices of readers for an article I’m still in the process of writing.)
‘Don’t I need a fancy desk, creative writing MA, to be able to spell, have an obliging muse and encyclopaedic knowledge, not to mention first-hand experience of everything I might want to write about and industry contacts and a quiet office and lots of free time and a style guide and an agent...?’
No. You don’t. Some of those things might come in useful once you’re writing and submitting work, but to get started you really only need a way to record your words and be willing to have a go.
The exceptions
All right, maybe it isn’t always quite that simple. There are people who can’t physically write by hand or simply prefer another method. If that’s you, perhaps you’ll type instead. Maybe you’ll use technology which converts spoken words into a computer document, or dictate into a device so the words can be typed up later. You might need a sophisticated system which converts eye movements into words (Professor Stephen Hawking has written several books using this method.) They all amount to the same thing – a way to capture your thoughts so that you, or others, may access them later.